By Guimel Sibingo Elisa Parsons-Facetti’s first birth was not the kind of the birth she had always imagined. Due to a late diagnosis of pelvic girdle pain, a common condition in pregnant women, Parsons-Facetti’s doctor recommended a Cesarean section. “It was my first pregnancy,” she said. “And I had to trust what the OBGYN was…

By Guimel Sibingo COLUMBIA – On the first day of Television Criticism class, Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media at the University of Missouri, asks her undergraduate students this question: “How many literature classes have you taken?” Most, if not all of the students raise their hands. “How many classes on television have…

By Guimel Sibingo A disease once thought to mean the end of person’s life is no longer and impediment to longevity. That means journalists have to get more sophisticated when it comes to news coverage of HIV, said Heather Boerner an independent journalist and author of Positively Negatively a book about advances in HIV treatment. Boerner and…

By Guimel Sibingo When the Ebola outbreak was confirmed March of last year, not very many journalists in the United States covered it. It was not until the Center for Disease Control confirmed the first case in the United States that the epidemic began to rule headlines and Twitter trends. Dr. Kent Brantley, an American,…

By Guimel Sibingo Science writer Tina Hesman Saey usually does not write about the culture of science. “I usually focus on the physical aspects of science,” Saey said recently. Saey typically covers molecular biology for Science News, a bi-weekly magazine that features the latest research in science. But lately, she has been engaging in some heavy-duty reporting concerning the…

By Guimel Sibingo They were the first to sound the alarm. Doctors Without Borders or MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières) urged the world to respond to the growing epidemic that was killing 90 percent of its victims. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was unlike any other. Almost 10,000 people have died since the outbreak was first confirmed in…

By Guimel Sibingo As a film about the pollution crisis hitting China today, The Chinese Mayor leaves much to be desired. However, it succeeds in brilliantly portraying the struggles of Chinese politics and the people’s relationship to their government. The film follows the daily life of Geng Yanbo, then mayor of Datong, a city that was once the…